Would it be a brand new year if we didn’t have the unveiling of Steven Soderbergh’s watch list? At this point, if you’re a huge film fan, you probably come to expect the big release of everything the filmmaker watched over the past year, looking over every entry to try to piece together what Soderbergh loved and what he skipped. And in 2020, with the COVID-19 pandemic forcing him to not make a half dozen films, it appears that Soderbergh did a lot of film and TV watching.
READ MORE: The 25 Best Films Of 2020
As in every “Seen, Read” list that he publishes each January, the content that Steven Soderbergh absorbed in 2020 is all over the place. From TV series such as “Rick & Morty” to films like “Mank,” the filmmaker covered the whole spectrum of film (shorts and features) and TV over the past year.
There are some quick observations that can be made while glancing at “Seen, Read 2020.” First, it’s always interesting to see just how early Soderbergh gets access to films that the public has to wait months for. Case in point—the filmmaker first saw David Fincher’s “Mank” way back on March 21. This is back at the beginning of when the shutdown happened and many people were wondering what the film festival circuit was going to look like. Clearly, Fincher had a cut he was willing to share back then because Soderbergh watched it twice that week. The filmmaker then watched it again in May and finally one more time in December, making “Mank” his most-watched film of 2020 (per this list).
READ MORE: Steven Soderbergh & Scott Z. Burns Are Developing A “Philosophical” Sequel To ‘Contagion’
It’s also really interesting to see when he began work on his latest film, “No Sudden Move.” As is the case with his previous “Seen, Read” lists, Soderbergh details when he begins production on a new feature. This is probably because it helps explain why he goes from watching multiple TV series and at least one film per day to then watching maybe one movie every few days. And for “No Sudden Move,” he began working on the film at the tail-end of September. Yes, that means he had a cut of the film available to view in November because, well, Soderbergh is really fucking fast.
The whole list is available here, and it is something you should definitely glance over. And then you can realize that if Steven Soderbergh has time to watch all of “Search Party” over a week-long period, there’s nothing holding you back from catching up before the new season arrives. That is the moral of the story, right?